Jai Murhekar, who ranked 49th in the Common Merit List of the Joint Engineering Examination (Advanced) and is the State topper in the exam, the results of which were released on Monday, wants to pursue CSE or Electrical Engineering in either the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras or in IIT-Bombay.
A resident of the city for the past 14 years, he said, “I took a lot of mock tests. I have been preparing for around four years.”
His father is with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and his mother is an oncologist at the Cancer Institute.
Ashwin Ramachandran, ranked 56 in the CRL, prefers CSE (Computer Science and Engineering) at IIT-B. His mother is a schoolteacher and his father an electrical engineer.
His inspiration is his uncle, who was ranked 49th in the JEE merit list in 1993 and now owns a start up in California. He said he referred to books that his faculty recommended.
He familiarised himself with problems from the books which helped him prepare better. “In that way, I was able to attend most of the questions,” he said.
C. Aditya, ranked 75th, began preparing four years ago. He took the mock exams regularly. His father is an IT software professional and his mother a homemaker.
Although the integrated programme and the preparation for Class 12 was hectic initially, “as the course went on, it became fun,” he said.
‘Sound grounding’
For A. Balakrishnan, too, it is CSE at IIT-Madras. He believes that a sound grounding in the basics is important before launching into specialisations.
His parents are both chemical engineers. Kruthic Vignesh M., ranked 126, also wants to take up CSE at IIT-Madras. His father is a professor in a polytechnic college. It was maintaining a regular habit of studying that helped him ace the exam, he says.
All these students took up the integrated coaching offered by FIIT JEE.
Sooraj Srinivasan, who is ranked 158, would also like to pursue CSE at IIT-Madras. A student of Aakash’s Classroom programme, he began preparing from Class 9.
The preference for artificial intelligence (AI), data science and machine learning, subjects that have caught the imagination of engineering aspirants, is absent in these toppers, all of whom believe a strong foundation is a must before moving to a specialisation.
